I was curious about the topic of Middle East (no personal ties) a couple of years before the October 7, so I got to witness the Wikipedia campaign unfold. The transformation is difficult to notice but changes are drastic over months (maybe weeks, but I didn’t consult it that often). Sometimes Wikipedia feels self-contradicting and tying itself in knots on some topics, like the dominant colonization angle. It feels like certain editors would prefer if there were no articles about the ancient cultures that existed in the area and relevant archeological evidence, luckily for now those are still difficult to remove.
It’s a sobering reminder that all knowledge is biased, no matter where you get it. So far Wikipedia is at least a good list of sources, but if you are truly interested in a remotely controversial topic you need to go to those sources and judge for yourself the veracity of each.
I somewhat wish there were more publicized instances of manipulation, just to combat Wikipedia’s reputation of being trustworthy that probably makes many people blind to the above.
(This is not a statement on whether I support all policies of incumbent Israeli government, etc.)
Crowd funded knowledge worked brilliantly for a time, people generally didn't try to manipulate it for political goals. These times sadly seem to be over.
Sure, it was never perfect and there still was bias, but today wikipedia is very unreliable for everything that somehow either touched the news cycle or is of interest of state actors. The latter often was restricted to specific languages, but today there are propaganda service provider that offer the whole package.
Comments
I was curious about the topic of Middle East (no personal ties) a couple of years before the October 7, so I got to witness the Wikipedia campaign unfold. The transformation is difficult to notice but changes are drastic over months (maybe weeks, but I didn’t consult it that often). Sometimes Wikipedia feels self-contradicting and tying itself in knots on some topics, like the dominant colonization angle. It feels like certain editors would prefer if there were no articles about the ancient cultures that existed in the area and relevant archeological evidence, luckily for now those are still difficult to remove.
It’s a sobering reminder that all knowledge is biased, no matter where you get it. So far Wikipedia is at least a good list of sources, but if you are truly interested in a remotely controversial topic you need to go to those sources and judge for yourself the veracity of each.
I somewhat wish there were more publicized instances of manipulation, just to combat Wikipedia’s reputation of being trustworthy that probably makes many people blind to the above.
(This is not a statement on whether I support all policies of incumbent Israeli government, etc.)
Crowd funded knowledge worked brilliantly for a time, people generally didn't try to manipulate it for political goals. These times sadly seem to be over.
Sure, it was never perfect and there still was bias, but today wikipedia is very unreliable for everything that somehow either touched the news cycle or is of interest of state actors. The latter often was restricted to specific languages, but today there are propaganda service provider that offer the whole package.